SuSE sucks! //at 02:24 //by abe

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available.

Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian).

Preparations

So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again.

When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible.

Read more…

Trojans must stay out //at 02:32 //by abe

On Heise’s security site HeiSec, Microsoft is advertising (in German) with a Flash animation of a rolling, black horse approaching the reader. Then suddenly a red gate closes and a text apprears:

Trojans must stay out.

If we translate this back to ancient greek history, it would say:

Microsofties must stay out

since Trojans were the inhabitants of Troy (German: Troja) and in the horse were the Greek aggressors. So I strongly agree. ;-)

I really hate it, if people just reverse the meaning of something by abbreviating it (here by turning the adjective into a noun). And then not noticing it. The term Trojan Horse in computing is just one (unfortunately) often seen example…

But no wonder that Microsoft doesn’t care about such things. They care about so less (e.g. stable software, secure operating systems, users, administrators, trust, etc.) except keeping their monopoly, making money and making even more money.

I changed my mind. I want a camera mobile phone. //at 02:29 //by abe

Today I read and wrote about Semapedia, a service respective toolset to encode Wikipedia URLs (and also others) as dot-matrix barcode, print them out on leaflets together with mentioning Wikipedia and the URL. Then any visitor with a modern camera cell phone can take an image of the barcode, decode it with the right software on your phone, which passes the decoded URL directly to the phones webbrowser.

This is the first useful application of camera phones I ever heard about. But I see it as so useful that I may consider buying me a camera cell phone with the next contract renewal, although until now, I focused all my search for a worthy successor to my Nokia 6310i on non-camera phones. (Update: And I’m not alone with the wish for a useful mobile phone.)

The 6310i had nearly everything I needed: A big memory, long standby times (1.5 to 2 weeks), WAP incl. WAP browser for reading Symlink on the road, GPRS, GSM 900/1800, T9, Infrared, gnokii support, the same battery bay than my former mobile phones (Nokia 6210 and 6130) and the Nokia typical, very intuïtive and blindly usable user interface. (Siemens mobiles suck!). It also had some things, I didn’t need yet, but sounded useful: Voice dialing and voice recording, Java for playing with own programs, Bluetooth for a cableless headset or so and GSM-1900 because perhaps also other countries than the USA use that frequency band. (I refuse to travel to the USA, so I won’t need the GSM-1900 there.)

It had nothing I didn’t want to have in a mobile phone: Camera, radio, MP3 player, standby time munching color display, e-mail client, MMS, MP3 ring tones or flip covers. The only thing I missed, was a more modern Java VM and even more memory when Opera Mini came out and maybe polyphone ring tones, so I could have the Monkey Island theme as ring tone. ;-)

So what now? Being able to use Opera Mini and Semapedia means to have a mobile phone with camera and — and that’s the drawback — a color display. Anyone knows a Nokia camera phone on which Opera Mini runs but without color display? And with the battery bay from the 6x10 series? No?

Or maybe I should just stay with the 6310i and get me a second one in better condition (no broken case) from eBay or so? There were also (yet unconfirmed) rumours that my GSM provider E-Plus will have the Linux based internet tablet Nokia 770 for a contract renewal plus 80€ to 90€… Difficult decision…

German voting statistics viewed from a Debian System //at 01:54 //by abe

The last years I always sticked to the voting statistics of the ARD Tagesschau, since the only acceptable other news source in German television, ZDF heute corporated with MSNBC.

But this year, also the Tagesschau showed the Microsoft logo in some statistic on TV, which the German Linux association LIVE tried to get removed by stating that this an illegal advertisment in a political TV show.

Well, they weren’t successful, but at least the statistics on the web don’t show an M$ logo. But they have another problem:

My desktop system, a Pentium II with 400 MHz and 578 MB of RAM, is still running Woody, because I yet can’t live without Galeon 1.2.x, which was replaced on Sarge by Galeon 1.3.x — a complete rewrite which lacks most features I liked in Galeon 1.2.x. Galeon 1.2.x doesn’t show the above mentioned website that good, so I tried some browsers from Sarge. But none of them showed that page correctly:

Galeon 1.2.5 based on Mozilla 1.4.2 from Debian 3.0 Woody	Firefox 1.0.4 from Debian 3.1 Sarge
Konqueror 3.3.2 from Debian 3.1 Sarge	Dillo 0.8.3 from Debian 3.1 Sarge

So interestingly, the page is best readable in Konqueror and Dillo while only Firefox doesn’t show all of the main content of the page.

Somehow I fear, the pages have been “optimised” for MSIE, while the ZDF voting statistics page just don’t work at all: It needs JavaShit and Flash. *plonk*

Regarding the published extrapolations: I’m at least happy that CDU (black, right conservative) and FDP (yellow, business liberal / free market) probably won’t have a majority. But what this will result in is still unknown. There are too many options open for our politicians to do any prediction. I would probably prefer Red-Red-Green or Red-Green as we have it at them moment. Worst case for me would be Black-Yellow.

WYSE: Jetzt mit Linux 6! //at 01:36 //by abe

dkg hat gestern auf Pro-Linux einen Artikel über die neue grml 0.6 geschrieben. Soweit so gut und alles ganz toll. Nur ist da dieser Flash-Werbebanner von WYSE über dem Artikel.

Als erstes stieß mir das “Wo f hlt sich Tux am wohlsten?” auf. Kein Umlaut. Nuja, mag vielleicht noch an der frisch auf 10.0 geupgradeten SuSE liegen. (Ausführlicher Rant Bericht dazu kommt noch. *eg*)

Heftiger war allerdings die Antwort: “In einem Winterm ThinClient mit Linux Version 6!”

<sarcasm>Linux 6?!? Da ist aber ein altes Linux drauf. Ich hab’ schon Linux 10!</sarcasm>

Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß ein Klick auf das Banner zu http://www.wyse.de/linux/ führt, was per META-Refresh mit einer Sekunde Verzögerung auf http://de.wyse.com/linux/ weiterleitet und damit auch nicht grade von sehr viel Durchblick in Sachen Medium und Leserschaft zeugt sowie den Groll desjenigen, der wissen will, was verdammt nochmal mit “Linux 6” gemeint sein könnte, nur noch weiter aufheizt.

Wann lernen die Marketing-Fuzzies endlich mal, daß es (noch) kein “Linux 6” oder “Linux 10” gibt, dafür aber wesentlich schnellere, bessere und sinnvollere Methoden als META-Refresh? (in diesem Fall z.B. die Werbung direkt mit der eigentlichen Seite verlinken… *hinthint*) Sorry, aber mit so ‘ner Werbung ist man zumindest auf Pro-Linux gewaltig fehl am Platz und vergrault sich eher potentielle Kunden als welche zu gewinnen. Ich werde jedenfalls WYSE zukünftig genüßlich meiden.